Practical Rails Plugins shows you how to capitalize upon the wide variety of plugins at your disposal by guiding you through their integration into a number of interesting projects. You’ll learn how to rapidly augment projects involving asynchronous video transcoding, geocoding and mapping, content management, community ratings, and PDF generation. You’ll also learn how to create and distribute your own plugins.

ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview is a first look at the ASP.NET MVC framework’s main features, designed to give you a head start getting to grips with this powerful new technology.

Bestselling Pro Drupal Development has been completely updated for Drupal 6 in this latest edition, and there are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer. Assuming you already know how to install and bring a standard installation online, John K. VanDyk gives you everything else you need to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition delves deep into Drupal internals, showing you how to take full advantage of its powerful architecture.

Pro Java™ EE Spring Patterns focuses on enterprise patterns, best practices, design strategies, and proven solutions using key Java EE technologies including JSP™, servlets, EJB™, and JMS APIs. This Java EE patterns resource, catalog, and guide, with its patterns and numerous strategies, documents and promotes best practices for these technologies, implemented in a very pragmatic way using the Spring Framework and its counters.

Take full advantage of everything SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services has to offer and deliver customizable, web–enabled reports across your business at a reasonable cost. Learn best–practices from professionals who use SQL Server Reporting Services daily to deliver solutions to paying clients and gain the competitive edge on using Microsoft’s enterprise–level reporting platform.

Mootools is a light, modular JavaScript framework that makes adding Ajax, animations, and interactive elements to your site a breeze. But it’s more than fancy effects and shortcuts; Mootools enhances the JavaScript language and makes writing clean, object–oriented code almost pleasant. Unlocking the power of Mootools, and therefore JavaScript, isn’t that hard, but knowing where to start can be. Mootools Essentials aims to help you with that task.

The Spring Framework remains the leader in the move from so–called heavyweight architectures, such as Enterprise JavaBeans, toward lightweight frameworks. Pro Spring 2.5 covers the new features of Spring 2.5, but moreover, it is focused on best practices and core standards of contemporary Spring development.

Bring Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to life in your organization with the expert guidance of author Philo Janus. From a walkthrough of the architecture, to the development of a complete, end–to–end business intelligence solution, you’ll find all you need to start using the new business intelligence solution that gathers data from corporate databases and delivers it to the end user in a friendly, graphical fashion.

Learn effective and scalable database design techniques in a SQL Server environment. Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation covers everything from design logic that business users will understand all the way to the physical implementation of the design in a SQL Server database.

In Beginning DB2, author Grant Allen gets you started using DB2 Express Edition for web sites, desktop applications, and more. The author covers the basics of DB2 for developers and database administrators, shows you how to manage data in both XML and relational form, and includes numerous code examples so that you are never in doubt as to how things work.

Discussing new and existing features, SQL Server designer and administrator Michael Coles takes you on an expert guided tour of Transact–SQL functionality in SQL Server 2008 in his book Pro T–SQL 2008 Programmer’s Guide. Fully functioning examples and downloadable source code bring Coles’ technically accurate and engaging treatment of Transact–SQL into your own hands. Step–by–step explanations ensure clarity, and an advocacy of best–practices will steer you down the road to success.

Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect will be required reading for all designers and engineers involved with the development, testing, and maintenance of APIs.

Chris Date, one of the founders of the relational model, has updated and expanded his relational database dictionary to be current with over 900 terms.

Start your journey toward SQL Server mastery with author and developer Robin Dewson. SQL Server 2008 includes exciting and powerful features that make it useful for everything from large corporate data warehouses to ad hoc departmental databases. You’ll learn how to take control of all the fundamental tasks, backups, and advanced features to make the most of SQL Server 2008.

SharePoint 2007 Development Recipes, Mark Gerow’s hands–on guide to solving common SharePoint 2007 programming dilemmas, is filled with ready–to–use code recipes categorized by problem area. This invaluable reference also includes clear, supporting guidelines to help you modify the code samples for the broadest range of applications.

Pro SQL Server 2008 Service Broker helps you to take full advantage of this key Microsoft technology, beginning from the fundamentals, moving through installation and application development, and ultimately showing you how to develop highly available and scalable applications based upon the Service–Oriented Architecture that is fast gaining ground as the way forward in application development.

SQL Server 2008 Transact–SQL Recipes: A Problem–Solution Approach is an example–based guide to the Transact–SQL language that is at the core of SQL Server 2008. Learn to create databases, insert and update data, generate reports, secure your data, and more.

On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders is an absorbing chronicle of the inventive, individualistic, and often cantankerous individuals who set the Internet free. Michael A. Banks describes how the online population created a new culture and turned a new frontier into their vision of the future.

Start with the basic setup of CakePHP and progress to building some applications that will highlight CakePHP’s functionality and capabilities. With Beginning CakePHP, you’ll avoid delving too deeply into the PHP language and focus on everything the CakePHP framework can offer the developer.